Dominions 4 is under development. It has been under development for quite some time and it has come long enough that we feel certain that it will be completed. More information will come later.

Not very helpful.

Edi wrote:

Let's dole out a bit more info before certain things start to repeat over and over:

Quote:

PRETENDERS - The ability to specify a complete pretender list for a custom nation. No default includes. Maybe you could add a "#clearpretenders" list command that flushes the pretender list so that you don't get the defaults.

Already in. This was one of the nation modding bits that had a big glowing bullseye target on its back and it came up during a modding manual update by yours truly. #restrictedgod is dead (and burned and salted and the ashes scattered for good measure), long live #addgod and #cleargods !

Quote:

Y-key fixes

Already in.

Quote:

In battle report, give more info about who died/lived in a battle.

Already in.

Quote:

Proper inbox and outbox for in-game messages, and the ability to change messages without redoing the whole turn.

Already in. You do need to redo the entire message if you want to modify one, though.

Quote:

Why not direct control over gem use for scripted spells, and the choice to specify whether gems can be used for unscripted spells or not. Or more simply a "use gems" checkbox.

It is possible to set mages to only use gems for scripted spells (checkbox). That's as far as it goes.

Sweet! Dom3 is a great, great game despite its interface and despite its AI, and there exist many interesting mods despite the limitations and frustrations involved in modding the damn thing. Honestly, I'd buy Dom3++ (Dominions 3 with those issues mitigated, if not solved), so I'll certainly buy Dom4. And if the game is genuinely improved along the way (making the suck nations not suck as much and making the insane nations less insane) then that'll be awesome. Plus it'll mean a period of time before the fan base schisms into rival camps concerning their preferred mod or lack-thereof (*cough*CBM*cough*).

Problem being that new sprites for a lot of stuff are a bottleneck. Since everything old is getting new sprites, for starters. I loves me the new King of the Deep sprite, for example, because that old one is Dom1 vintage, Dom2 at best.

No, that's not Hinnom redone. It is one of the new nations. There are more than two new nations, but I will not tell you how many. However, in terms of nation listings, the Dominions 3 mod manual is now accurate for early era.

In plain English, one of the new nations is Machaka: Lion Kings for the early era. The rest shall remain shrouded in mystery for a while yet.

Quote:

Ur is a nation of wild men (Enkidus) and their first city. They are influenced by early Sumer, the Gilgamesh epos, Athrahasis and other mesopotamian stuff.
The enkidus also appear as slaves in the Hinnom rooster. They are ogre-sized rather than giant-sized, but larger and stronger than humans. They are a conversion from Enkidus of the aforementioned Illwinter project.

Reverse communions were never an intended feature of the game. Johan tried to kill them off, but unfortunately he was not completely successful. The current mechanic works so that as long as there is a single master on the field, slaves can do nothing but stand still. They do get all the buffs the master gets and they get to keep them if the master leaves the field.

I don't actually see how that changes the Reverse Communion much. I mean, it makes Ghost Riders more powerful, but it does not otherwise seem to matter.

Here's a short list with the most important changes compared to Dominions 3.

• Teamplay, one pretender and one or more disciples per team.
• Thrones of Ascension. Claim thrones to gain extra powers and to win the game eventually.
• Many sprites have been redrawn and the 3d terrain is also improved.
• Many user interface improvements.
• Formations like line formation or skirmish formation.
• Improved random map generation with wraparound maps, caves, rivers and mountain passes.
• Rivers that can only be passed when frozen, mountain passes that can only be passed by special units and when it's warm.
• Pierce, slash and blunt weapons have slightly different quirks. E.g. don't shoot arrows at skeletons.
• Darkness and dark vision plays a more important role. Notably in deep seas, caves and sometimes during assassinations.
• Range restrictions on magic rituals and items and spells that can be used to boost ritual ranges.
• Improved network support, turns can be resumed from any computer and turns can be marked as only half finished.
• Global random events
• Can build castle improvements like extra towers or extra supply storage
• Province Defence dependent on the local population and some nations have easier or harder to organize it.
• Improvements to AI and to modding.
• Many new monsters, spells, magic items, sites, random events and some nations too.

Teams are set at game creation and cannot be altered. The allied nations
can be humans or AI. Teams have two or more nations, one pretender god
and as many disciples as there are allies to the main god, but there is
just one dominion and one bless, set by the god nation.

There are no prophets in a disciple game, because the disciple is the
equivalent of a prophet. The number of temples required to bump dominion
score up is not the straightforward 5 per point, but a function of the
number of nations in the alliance.

The armor and weapon types entry is wrong. Resistances (slash/pierce/blunt) reduce damage of that type by 50% and are separate from armor. Each damage type interacts differently with the protection value and that is a separate mechanic from the damage type resistances

General
Many sprites have been redrawn and the 3d terrain is also improved.
Many new monsters, spells, magic items, sites, random events and some nations too.

Modding
There is a good likelihood of moddable UI in patches
Modding is still done by text files and 2d art. Editor and paint program is sufficient.
Modding limits have improved: spells 1999, nations 101 to 199 available now, weapons, items etc unknown as yet.
The ability to specify a complete pretender list for a custom nation. No default includes.

Mechanics
Thrones of Ascension. Claim thrones to gain extra powers and to win the game eventually.
Teamplay, one pretender and one or more disciples per team.
Rivers that can only be passed when frozen, mountain passes that can only be passed by special units and when it's warm.
Pierce, slash and blunt weapons have slightly different quirks. E.g. don't shoot arrows at skeletons. Creatures may have resistance. Resistances (slash/pierce/blunt) reduce damage of that type by 50% and are separate from armor. Each damage type interacts differently with the protection value and that is a separate mechanic from the damage type resistances.
Some afflictions are connected to weapon type such as arm loss.
Range restrictions on magic rituals and items and spells that can be used to boost ritual ranges.
Darkness and dark vision plays a more important role. Notably in deep seas, caves and sometimes during assassinations.
Global random events
Can build castle improvements like extra towers or extra supply storage
Province Defence dependent on the local population and some nations have easier or harder to organize it.
Some AI improvements are pending but unknown.
Reverse communions radically changed. Slaves do nothing as long as any master remains in the battle. However, if a master retreats the slaves cast and keep any buffs.
Major changes to recruitable SCs. The details are unclear yet.

User Interface
Scripts can be changed by individual spell or command by delete or by rewrite. No more rewriting an entire 5 slots.
Formations like line formation or skirmish formation.
Improved network support, turns can be resumed from any computer and turns can be marked as only half finished.
Verification of path and gem requirements of scripts is included. You will know if your mage can cast the script.
'Y' key hotkey improvements. No exact knowledge yet.
Greater detail in battle reports.
Inbox/Outbox and redo a message without redoing all messages.
Checkbox for use gems for ONLY scripted spells.

Last edited by Shatner on Mon Jun 24, 2013 6:28 pm; edited 2 times in total

Frank has a good point. Mechanics have changed. In several instances. Clams work differently as do communions. National armies will probably see more use. Leadership is more important.
I cannot honestly say that I know what nations will loose or gain power. I'm not that much of an analyst myself. OK, I am, but not as much as most people on these fora .

BTW I can confirm that Vanarus is finished. Perhaps needing some tweaks. More on them at a later date.

Other than that Franks points are quite valid I think, and I see them as a good reason why a new CBM is likely to eventually arise for dom4 as well, since that is a modding communitys way to address balance issues.

Sadly, you are correct. But it is also and equally a profound example of why that's unfortunate. CBM has a lot of changes I agree with, but it also has a lot of changes that I don't agree with. The methodology of making it in the first place is extremely sloppy and the fact remains that every time you change anything you create ripples of winners and losers that are often quite hard to predict in advance. I don't think a lot of people would have predicted ahead of time that in the switch from Dominions 2 to 3 that making troops more important and research slower would ruin Ulm. Most people would have probably predicted the opposite. When you make hundreds if not thousands of balance changes, you do not as a whole get a more balanced game, just a different one that people have to learn from scratch.

Unless the Dominions 4 CBM variant adopts a much more conservative and skeptical approach to balance fiddling, the results are going to be as silly and fanbase dividing as they were for Dominions 3. One day you're combing through the mod code and you suddenly notice that you can quickly and cheaply put together an army of hundreds of... Shade Beasts? Sure, why not! And then you're off to the races with something that is far more game defining and broken than anything in the base game until it gets out that you've done that and the mod gets updated. Or maybe the troop dejure for today is Bog Beasts or Ice Drakes. Or whatever. The point is that not only are these sort of silly "We modded the cost of these niche creatures that you only use in emergencies down until you use them in non-emergency situations, and now they are game dominating because people use them all the time" situations basically inevitable when you start changing every single thing you don't use much; but when you have a very long change log it is a virtual certainty that you're going to be creating unforeseeable winners and losers with the ripple effects of these changes.

I want to like balance mods. I think a lot of good can be done there. But I cannot and will not support a balance modding community that doesn't require a vigorous defense of every proposed change. Because a change that isn't well justified and thought out is very likely to cause imbalances elsewhere in the system. Imbalances that are in turn quite frequently larger than whatever they were created to address in the first place.

I think we can all agree that MA Agartha is underpowered. I think we can all agree that it is weak enough that it's a problem. But simply fiddling with the numbers to make their stuff cheaper and better until they win games is not and cannot be the answer. For one thing, when you're shaking up the numbers, you're automatically destroying a lot of your testers' relevant system mastery, which means that shortly after you declare victory over the Agartha balance point, the metagame is going to adapt and you won't have a balance point anymore.

The question should never be "What all can we change?" The question can and should be "What are the minimum possible changes to achieve our goals?"

-Frank

If a Dominions 4 CBM were to arise (and it will, in time), what process should it follow/what form should it take to be the Carefully Balanced Mod? By way of an example, could you walk us through how you would balance Clams?

Last edited by Shatner on Wed Jun 26, 2013 4:08 pm; edited 1 time in total

If a Dominions 4 CBM were to arise (and it will, in time), what process should it follow/what form should it take to be the Carefully Balanced Mod? By way of an example, could you walk us through how you would balance Clams?

Clams are an extreme example because they affect something extremely fundamental. They are a method by which you convert (mostly Water) gems now into Astral Pearls later. Fiddling with the cost doesn't really change the fundamental equation that much, in that in a long enough game a Clam will always "pay off" and in a short enough game it will always be a shitty deal. Many of the big Astral powers are either lurker powers (Atlantis) or have lots of things they need to do with Astral gems in the late game (Bandar Log) or both (R'lyeh).

So first of all, you'd want to draw up several game "styles" to test your ideas in. You don't really need to do anything in Rush games, because it's already trivially obvious that Clams are already a pointless waste of time in them. It is in no way worth a hammer turn to realize a one gem profit in 15 turns in a game that is going to be over before the end of year three. But you're going to want to look at games that we'll call "short", "medium", and "long". You're also going to want to consider the truly "epic" games like Mega Age games, where it is essentially inconceivable to put any price on a gem producer that would not turn a profit eventually (to the point that people are already looking into Sea King's Courts as a way to make gems) - but that's a special case.

Now we consider our balance targets. Certainly one available balance point is to remove clams altogether, at which point your new task is to show that all the Clam reliant factions still work. Another balance point is to change the cost so that they took longer or less long to break even on clamming. Another available option is to change the research level that Clams appear at, making it so that while it wouldn't take any more time for a clam to break even, you wouldn't be offered the option until later in the game. More complicated balance points, such as making absolute clam limits per faction or providing clams for other gem types are beyond the limits of Dominions 3, but they may not be in Dominions 4. But for now, we'll consider just the Dominions 3 options of cost and research requirement.

As a simple matter of arithmetic, any clams which have a combined time to research plus time to make back investment that adds up to more than the expected number of turns simply doesn't exist in games of that expected length. So for any game duration short enough for that to be true, you'd have to show that Bandar Log and Rlyeh are working (or at least working well enough to fit into your design goals).

For games which are still long enough for clams to at some point "pay off", you'd want to run parallel strategies. Clamming doesn't just have an investment time and payoff period, it has opportunity cost. Rushing to Construction 2 isn't that big of a deal, and you probably want to get your grubby mits on a hammer in any case, but even so 100 research points could have gotten you from Evocation 2 to 3 and gotten you Acid Bolt and Fireball. And if we're talking about getting to 4 or 6 in Construction, we're now talking about being able to get some real power from other research paths. And of course, spending gems now may be more valuable than spending them later if you can use them to bash heads in. Spending Water and Nature Gems on Clams must at the very least be compared to summoning up Naiad Warriors and Bog Beasts to simply go out and take provinces along with whatever gem generating sites they have. If a province's sites generate 3 gems a turn, then if you spent less than 33 Water Gems and 9 Nature Gems to take it, you're ahead of the clamming.

So that's what I'd be looking at. You'd make your proposed play dynamic, you'd test the relevant nations in the types of games that you had soft- or hard-banned clams in. And you'd test the relevant nations in the types of games where clams were still going to pay off eventually. And you'd compare those nations to strategically to simply spending Water and Nature gems as water and nature gems to raise armies or outfit thugs or power battle casters and go out and carve a physically larger economy from the world.

And yeah, before you've done that, I can't really take your clam "fix" seriously as more than "some dude's random proposed change backed up by navel gazing".

Considering that the current conversion ratio is 4:1 (2:1 for astral), that would be pretty damn important. Even an item that let you transform 2 gems of one type into a gem of another type could be critical in a medium or long game._________________The Unpublishable - Updates Fridays between midnight and midnight | http://wikithulhu.com

I am only speculating on what form the change to gem production items could take. I have no idea what the dev's have in mind.

The other nerf possibility that comes to my mind is that gem production items might lock gem access to the commander holding the item. Similar to mercenary casters, the gems would only be used for battle spellcasting.

The leadership changes are at the same time both more complex and simpler than the speculation in this thread, for the most part. The standard ability has been altered as part of the leadership changes and there are several other new abilities that are morale and leadership related.

...

The leadership effects are tiered and they start out from the negative. You really, really do not want most mages leading normal troops if you can avoid it. And you preferably want actual real commanders (ldr 80+) leading them instead. The regular 40 ldr commanders are okay, but just okay and no more than that.

And that's before you start adding the other new morale effect abilities into the mix. However, these things are on/off in the sense that they cannot be acquired (or gotten rid of) later, the baseline determines the effect, which is then either enhanced (in case of positives) or mitigated (in case of negatives) as troops gain experience.

They gave out a better description of the team game option. It is called a "Disciples" game.

Each player on a team has their own nation, but only one is the "Pretender God". The others are "Disciples".

No player gets to make Prophets in a Disciples game.

All players on a team share the same dominion and bless as the God.

The "Disciples" are built like Pretenders (buy chassis, buy paths), but you don't choose Awakening or Dominion.

Disciples are one stage more Awake than the God automatically.

No word yet on whether you have to have the same scales as the other folks on your team. I'm hoping you don't, because of course there are a lot of factions that match up in scale demands and a lot of factions that don't. I'd hate to be Abysia and be albatrossed with Cold and Sloth because my god was R'lyeh.

Disciples have a fixed number of points to buy their chassis and magical paths with.

Apparently dominion is shared and increasing dominion strength by building temples requires proportionally more temples.

Edi mentioned that he did not know how the domain interacts with special nations, such as Dreamlands, Ashen Empire, Miasma and Golem Cult.

Noone in the threads I have read thought to ask about how dominion-wide globals interact with the shared dominion either. Do the freespawn from Carrion Woods end up under the control of the casters nation, or are they under the control of the owner of the province? Does Dark Skies inflict a penalty to your allies in friendly dominion, or just your enemies?

It's not just that everything you say is stupid, but that they are Gordian knots of stupid that leave me completely bewildered as to where to even begin. After hearing you speak Alexander the Great would stab you and triumphantly declare the puzzle solved.